Monday, March 10, 2014

Public Image Limited

The capital has a woeful amount of public space to offer its citizens, who are instead usually to be found taking sanctuary down in its shopping

Let's
not mince words here, Jakarta is in dire need of public space and parks for its
citizens to unwind in. Now admittedly a certain amount of progress on this
issue has been made over the last few years and parks such as Taman Tebet, Taman
Menteng and Taman Aydoya, for example, have been spruced up in an attempt to
offer the city's residents some non-retail-based respite. However these parks
are but a drop in the ocean given the city's eight-digit population and given a
2007 spatial-planning law which states that Jakarta should dedicate at least 30
per cent of its total area to green space.

This
ambitious target is seemingly impossible to achieve without the demolition of a
huge number of the shops, plazas, offices and private residences that cram this
densely packed rabbit warren of a city, and so increasingly, the only option
available is for people to traipse around privately owned shopping plazas and gawp
at the goods on offer, while developing their own pathological addictions to
conspicuous consumption.

A
prime example of this phenomenon came last month when an enormous crush of
people pushed, jostled, gnashed teeth, wailed and fainted outside the Pacific Place
shopping mall in a bid to get their hands on the latest model of BlackBerry
smartphone, which was being offered at half price. The expressions on these
people’s faces as they shoved and shouted were no different from those worn by
emaciated refugees as they fight over food aid. There are always new needs that
need to be sated, and identity is now more defined by what you own than it is
by what you are, think or do.

A
moratorium on the issuing of permits for the construction of shopping plazas is
now in effect. The city is already hyper-saturated
with retail palaces though, many of which have been constructed to the
detriment of public parks and spaces. As well as offering fresh air to the
lungs, parks also have an important cultural role to play in offering a public
sphere in which people can mingle and socialize, external to the hyperactive demands
of consumer commerce.

It's
a tough ask though. If 30 per cent of the city's total area was turned into
parks and public spaces, the results would clock in at around 650 square
kilometres. Compare that with the park that surrounds Jakarta's National Monument
(Monas), which covers a mere 0.8 square kilometres. Hmmm.

As
well as parks, pedestrian space is also an important element of any modern
metropolis’s public sphere. Alas however, most of the city's pavements are
filled with parked cars and food stalls, and pedestrians and their green use of
bioorganic leg power are all too sadly stacked at the bottom of the pile in
this heaving city.

Citizens
of other cities around the world though think nothing of a 20-minute stroll down
to the shops or to their local subway station. This is largely due to the fact
that it's possible to complete such journeys without tripping over, falling
down a manhole, being forced into the road to play chicken with endless
motorcycles or otherwise being asphyxiated, shouted at, tapped up by primary-school
beggars or scalded by flying fried rice. Recent attempts to clear the sidewalks
of such obstructions have been, to say the least, rather halfhearted, and so
the inveterate walker faces an uncertain future.

One
doesn't have to leave the country to find more positive pedestrian scenes
however. In Java's lush countryside, school kids think nothing of cycling or
walking for kilometres through verdant palm trees and paddy fields to get to their
schools. In Jakarta's urban jungle however, trying to negotiate oneself through
the city's chaotic Brownian motion on foot is perhaps not unlike walking along
the pavements of a more-organised metropolitan environment having drunk five
bottles of Bintang.

All
of these problems, the commercialisation of public space, the difficulty of
pedestrian travel and the lack of green areas, all serve to alienate and
isolate the city’s comparatively well off, with their cars and credit cards,
from the city's bustling but impoverished street life and thus the deep wound
of Jakarta’s yawning income chasm is never challenged by the soothing balm of trans-class
interaction and pollination.

Yes,
Jakartans love their shopping malls but they represent something of a
consumerist, self-fulfilling prophecy. If people have nowhere else to go in
their leisure time other than such places, then where are they going to end up?
If someone had the vision and bravery to build a sports centre, a theatre, an
art-house cinema, or even a park, basically anything one step removed from the
need to turn an instant return on one's investment, are we to believe that no
one would go to them? Perhaps, a thousand years hence, cyborg archaeologists
and anthropologists will unearth the remains of Jakarta's great plazas, along
with petrified Starbucks beakers and fossilised mobile phone casings and
pontificate on what strange religion their ancestors practised in these places.
I have seen the future, and it is latte coloured. January sales anyone?